Emulation of identity.

as contact management apps appear to really just not work very well

After an evening spent updating my contacts by hand, as contact management apps appear to really just not work very well, I retired to bed with the new Paul Kingsnorth book, BEAST. His previous book, THE WAKE, was written in a remastered form of Old English. I’d previously finished Walter Benjamin’s diary, ONE-WAY STREET, which is shot through with Surrealist-style dream protocols.

Last night I dreamed that it was discovered that time travel was only achievable robotically – I kind of blame Nicola Barker’s THE CAULIFLOWER for this, too. And so we sent tiny fly-sized drones into the past, devices that could be biodegraded or self-incinerated to preserve the timeline. Video was difficult. But we could transmit audio back up the line. Archived sound recording has been in my head since a tour of the basement levels of the British Library a while back, in pursuit of an abortive spoken-word project about radio.

In the dream, in my head, I could hear Old English being spoken in the 10th Century, amongst the crackling of old fires and the lapping of buried rivers.